LEGO Marvel Super Heroes Strategy Guide Review

LEGO Marvel Super Heroes is one of the most fun LEGO games I have honestly ever played. The hub worlds are massive, the dialogue is hysterical, and the gameplay is so fun, you kind of forget how repetitive the game really is. The co-op is awful, but that’s a story for another day. Since it is a LEGO game, it has a metric ton of collectibles, in both the main game and in the hubs. As such, the strategy guide needs to be heavily detailed and accommodating for all of these collectibles, as playing the game in of itself is not that difficult. I am very sad to say that the LEGO Marvel Super Heroes strategy guide has too many typos, errors, missing information, and completely inaccurate information for it to be recommended one hundred percent.

LEGO guides in the past have always been set up with a main walkthrough for the story that contains information on finding all of the collectibles, even on freeplay. In this manner, everything about the main campaign is all in one place, so if you miss something in the story, you can easily find it as you run through again. Also, if you get stuck in free play, you see the story walkthrough hints to remind you how to get through a certain area once more. The LEGO Marvel Super Heroes strategy guide breaks these strategies up. The story is in one section, and the free play is in another. The strategy guide could have been so much more concise if it was all bunched together. Plus, it would have prevented additional page flipping as I had to remind myself what random thing I needed to build/trigger that I wasn’t seeing this time around.

Missing A5…

In regards to finding these collectibles, the maps provided are almost more important than the information on how to get a mini-kit or rescue Stan Lee. A few maps had collectibles swapped from their actual locations, and one map left off one mini-kit location completely. It wouldn’t have been as big of a deal if this particular mini-kit didn’t require players to destroy a certain number of items in the level in order to unlock the mini-kit. The locations of each of these breakable items were not listed in the written portion, so the maps have to be reliable for these. At least in this one situation, the breakable items were easy to find, but that’s still no excuse.

Then sadly, there is all of the inaccurate information. Some of the stud requirements for achieving True Believer status were completely wrong (sometimes by 10,000 studs), the Achievement/Trophy list has Trophies that do not exist and is missing Trophies that do exist, and there were a large number of typos in the walkthroughs and even in the design of the guide itself (two level 12s).

When it comes to hunting down those gold bricks, character tokens, red bricks, and wayward Stan Lees in Peril in the hubs, the LEGO Marvel Super Heroes strategy guide is spot on. Thank God it is too, because I do not have the patience to hunt down all 200 of the missions you need to unlock everything else. Plus, Stan Lee moves constantly. You save him in one area, he gets in trouble somewhere else. The strategy guide paints a nice path of where Stan Lee will go next. The missions in the hubs are crafted in the same way; you must complete a particular one to unlock another. With the strategy guide, I was able to plot out exactly where I was going to go with both the missions and Stan Lee so I could get through it in the most efficient manner possible.

The back half of the strategy guide is for the handheld version of the game, which is a completely different game in both format and gameplay. Each level is built upon a set of challenges, some of which you can do the first time through and some are better saved for free play. The strategy guide provided fantastic tips for beating each challenge, and it pretty much saved my Vita from being tossed across the room. The handheld version is definitely not as intuitive as the console, and I never would have gotten past the second level without it.

This is the only checklist I didn’t mark up.

The best part(s) of the strategy guide by far are the checklists. The checklists provide the best way to track exactly which gold bricks you have unlocked in the hubs, which Stan Lees have been saved, which character tokens you have found, etc., etc., etc. I normally hate writing in books, but you better believe I used my pen to mark off the gold bricks I found with each hub excursion.

The LEGO Marvel Super Heroes strategy guide is a mixed bag, and I really tossed and turned over what rating to give it. The inaccurate information disappoints me greatly, but it’s not enough to completely mar everything else the strategy guide does really well. Just be prepared to use the code inside to unlock the e-guide from Prima Games so you can get a bit more accurate info when needed.